Passing Connection Information from SalesLogix Web to Another Website

When integrating another system, application, or website with SalesLogix there are many options. If you’re need to make connections to the SalesLogix database via the provider using user credentials you either need to prompt the user for login (again) or you can pass the connection information along to the other system.

It’s easy enough to get the connection information using the DataService in SalesLogix. However, you don’t really want to pass around a complete connection string around, especially since it will have the user’s username and password in it. However, you can get the user’s authentication token and then pass that to another system. It can use that authentication token to get all the connection values and form a valid connection string. Let’s take a look.

Retrieving the current user’s Authentication Token

To retrieve the user’s authentication token, you can use the AuthenticationProvider service.

The authentication token will look like a long string of letters and numbers. You can pass this to some other website so that website/webpage can log into SalesLogix as that same user without prompting the user for their username and password. Let’s look at what to do with this authentication token.

Decrypting and Using the Authentication Token

Once the other website or webpage has the Authentication Token all you need to do is convert it back to a stream and then read out the values from it. Then you have everything you need to form a valid connection string to the SalesLogix database as the user whose authentication token you have.

Pretty easy and the other external website or password didn’t need to ask the user again for credentials or store a connection string locally.

Note if passing the Auth Token in a URL

If you are passing this authorization token from SalesLogix to another website or webpage via a parameter in the URL, you must encode the token otherwise any contained “+” chars will break the string (since that will be interpreted in the URL as a space).

On the SalesLogix side, encode the token using something like this:

authToken = System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode(authToken);

Then, on the receiving side, grab the token from the URL and then decode is using something like this:

authToken = System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlDecode(authToken);

Then all will work fine and you can proceed to get the connection values from the token.

Ryan Farley is the Director of Development for Customer FX and creator of slxdeveloper.com. He's been blogging regularly about SalesLogix, now Infor CRM, since 2001 and believes in sharing with the community. He loves C#, Javascript, web development, open source, and Linux. He also loves his hobby as an amateur filmmaker.

1 Comment

If you’re doing that from a menu item you would need to set the location that the menu goes to at runtime. You can refer to this post on getting access to the menu items from a module: customerfx.com/…/creating-modules-for-saleslogix-web-and-hiding-toolbar-items-at-runtime.aspx This article looks are removing menu items in code, but once you have the menu item you could set it’s link location just the same (and append on the authentication token)